I realise that, this week, people will have a great deal on their minds. We are living in uncertain times. If we knew each other well, this week’s events would very likely be the topic of this morning’s sermon. As it’s my first time here, however, I don’t want to risk offending anyone, or opening up uncomfortable conversations. So I think it best if I focus on talking about something far less contentious: the question of who wrote the Torah.
Once, in my early teens, I sat with my rabbi, helping her to organise some books. As I picked up a chumash, a question occurred to me. “Rabbi,” I asked “who wrote the Torah?”
“God,” she answered, without skipping a beat.
I thought that perhaps I had phrased the question wrong. “But… who published it?” I asked.
“Hmm… if you look in the inside cover of that one, it should tell you. I think that was Soncino.”
Her answer reflected a familiar and tradition of Torah authorship. As we raise the Torah for hagbah before reading it, we sing to each other: “this is the Torah that Moses put before the children of Israel – from the mouth of God, by the hand of Moses.”
It was an answer, but it wasn’t the answer I was looking for. The trouble was that I wasn’t sure what question I was trying to ask.
A few years ago, I sat in a university seminar and did get the answer I’d been seeking out as a teenager. The Torah, my lecturer explained, was written by four main schools over a period of several centuries. Each one represented a different theology and interest group. Their traditions were later redacted into a single document.
It was a revelation. A profoundly disappointing revelation. I felt a bit disillusioned. By explaining the Torah historically, my lecturer had robbed the text of something of its mystery. Part of me wanted to go back to the answer of my rabbi: the Torah was written by God, and that was that.
And yet the conclusions of the historical approach were very hard to ignore. In this week’s parasha, for example, we read the list of “the kings who reigned in the land of Edom before any king reigned over the Israelites.”[1] Yet our text speaks to a time centuries before the Israelites got their first king. The idea of an Israelite kingdom is, seemingly, completely unknown to the Torah and doesn’t appear in Tanach until the book of Samuel. How could Moses know that there would one day be an Israelite king?
Asking questions like these is, indeed, the basis for the entire enterprise of working out the historical authorship of the Torah. The book of Deuteronomy, for example, legislates for the possibility of monarchy and sets out a series of reforms for the Israelites that match quite closely with the laws set down by King Josiah. As a result, early historians of the text suggested that the two likely came from the same era – the 6th Century BCE, several hundred years after the Torah was said to have been revealed at Mount Sinai.
When the theory that the Torah had multiple authors was first advanced by Protestants in 19th Century Germany, it was embraced by many of the early Reform Jews. Part of the impetus behind the Jewish reformation was a feeling that the tools of science and history were fundamentally challenging old beliefs about the nature of religious truth. Our Reform ancestors felt that they had to adapt to this new knowledge or lose their own integrity.
Understanding the Torah in its historical context can also help us today. There is no getting round the reality that some verses are quite objectionable to modern ears. In our parashah this week, too, we read about Jacob having two wives (Rachel and Leah) and two concubines (Bilhah and Zilpah). The idea that our founding prophet had two women as low-status mistresses in addition to his wives doesn’t do much to elevate his moral status in our eyes. Putting the Torah in its historical context doesn’t necessarily absolve him of our moral concerns, but it does help justify why we would never allow such practices today.
This week, I told a group of adult students who grew up secular and are connecting with their heritage that the question of who wrote the Torah is a denominational difference. One woman was really disappointed. Her reaction was the same as mine when I first heard about historical criticism: “how can you be Jewish and not think the Torah was given to Moses at Sinai?”
It’s understandable to be deflated by hearing that the Torah may not have come directly from God. If it doesn’t come from the Divine Author, what makes it holy? Why is it worth reading at all? Why do we come here each week to hear these words?
There are some good answers that help keep the holiness of the Torah intact. One of these is to challenge the assumptions of the historical critical method itself. How can anyone definitely assert that this text came from multiple authors? If you are willing to accept that an omniscient God is present in the text, there’s no reason why that God couldn’t foresee the future of Israelite kings or anticipate the needs of future societies. Any form of faith involves some suspension of judgement – why can’t we extend that to the authorship of the Torah?
Yet it is hard to deny that human hands were involved in the transmission of our text. In this very portion, there are already dots above certain words, which traditional Judaism teaches were put in by Ezra the Scribe over words he believed might be spelling errors. Even on the most Orthodox reading of the text, there is more going on here than simply God handing down a pristine document.
Perhaps we could say, as some do, that the texts were divinely inspired but written by human beings. God revealed different messages to different people for their own times, knowing that God would continue to work with humanity to help us better understand truth. Just as God spoke to the Israelites at Sinai, God engages with us today, and helps us to find spiritual meaning for our times. Yet this answer has its own problem: isn’t there an arrogance in us claiming to know more about moral truth than our prophets like Moses did?
Personally, the answer I like best is that what makes the Torah holy isn’t its author but its readership. We, the Jewish people, through centuries of transmission, questioning, storytelling and interpreting based on this book, have turned it into a holy book. When we engage with it today, God is not waiting in the text to be found, but is with us as an active participant in the conversations we have with Torah. God is in the space where two people pore over this ancient text.
The Torah, then, is not so much a destination for divine revelation, as a mode of transport for getting there. Difficult, challenging, confusing and strange. But it’s a wonderful ride. It’s a journey worth making. Let’s continue to join each other on this voyage of discovery, to uncover the deepest truths we can today.
[1] Gen 36:31
I gave this sermon for Parashat Vayishlach on Saturday 24th November at Newcastle Reform Synagogue.
Sim Lev 